“Name this tune,” he said to her.
“No,” she said.
His head was against the side of her head, and as he took in the big wooden room, he knew he was different than he’d been even a week ago. He knew he was different than he’d been an hour ago. He was a kid who had always been on balance, and now he felt as if he were fighting not to fall. There was a vague lump in his throat that had been there since before the football game, that he had thought was excitement but now felt like an urgent sadness; actually it felt like both. His whole body glowed with bruises and this dim rushing joy. There was a clear blue footprint along the bottom of his ribcage. He leaned back a few inches to say something to Wendy, and she took the signal and leaned back, and their faces in that proximity stunned him, and he only looked at her for a startling second and pulled her close again. Closer, in fact, than he’d intended. It was purposeful that he didn’t kiss her.
“Larry?” she said.
It was all he needed, an opening. When he leaned back this time, it was as if he were leaning out of an airplane with nothing beneath him, and he knew he was going to say absolutely anything. What he said was her name, and he saw her face when she heard it, and now she put her head into his shoulder. But he was going on. “Do you think, at the advanced age of seventeen”—and he couldn’t stop—“that love and sex are the same thing? Is one required before the other? Are they related at all?”
“Larry,” she said.
“Do you know Wade talks about you?” They were still dancing somehow, but the room was subsumed in shadow and the music was far away, and from this place Larry went forward. “Do you know Wade said he bit you, your breast? Has he?” When Larry said the last, his voice broke, and the lump asserted itself as a clear anchor wanting him. Anybody who looks at me, he thought, will know what I am saying. Wendy was in his face now, her expression stern and ready, as if challenging him to say more. Now they had stopped dancing. “Don’t let him,” Larry whispered to her. Saying that winded him, left him nothing, and he was sure he was going to drop Wendy, who looked at him with horror and understanding. She shifted so she could put the flat of her hand on his chest, and he felt the lump, the pressure, double. Their eyes were welded.
“I’m sure he didn’t say it that way,” she said. Her face was hard. “And you’re too late.” And then as an awkward footnote, she again said his name, “Larry,” as if calling roll, and she folded herself against him for the duration of the song. He could feel her four fingertips in the top of his shoulder. They couldn’t speak again because the music stopped, and suddenly Wade and Stephanie were before them.
“This wild thing can dance!” Wade said. “She’s a bona fide mover.” There was a line of sweat along Wade’s hairline, and Stephanie’s face shone under the leafy canopy. Larry turned to Wendy one last time before claiming his own date, but he saw she was looking past him at Stephanie, the significant tops of her breasts. “What say we depart these premises?” Wade said. “You guys ready to get some dinner?”
“In a minute,” Larry told Wade. “One more dance with my date. May I call you my date?”
“I am your date,” Stephanie said. “And you can call me that all night long.”
Holding her now and moving away in the shadows calmed Larry. He liked the way she put the corner of her forehead against his cheek, and he held her floating as the music waved through the room. How many times had he danced? Not a dozen. It was a strange activity in which, listening to music and responding to your partner, you moved with no clear destination. He loved it. Larry knew immediately that he would not dance enough in his life.
“Did you go to the junior prom?” he asked Stephanie.
“No. Did you?”
“I didn’t. What were we thinking of, missing that?”